Some folk are complaining about the size and how terrible it is that it's so bulky. But not me. I like that it's something you can hold p easily. There are plenty of other (easily solvable) problems with it, but the size ain't one of them.
That looks a good deal smaller than my Sumsung Galaxy Mega and the Mega fits in my pockets (mostly) and is not too large to hold.
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The best way to make America great is to lower the standards!
This looks cool! It has a 1-TB built-in hard disk and a wireless remote. It can store all your music and movies on the HD and play them back through your TV and/or sound system. Because it's based on the Pi, it's quiet (no fan) and low power - but still blazingly fast (full HD video at full HD frame rates no problem).
You can also load any Raspberry Pi operating system onto it - so if you just want a super-Pi that looks cool with a huge hard disk built into the box it will do that too.
I pledged. I'm pretty sure this kickstarter will quickly reach its target, so I expect to get my unit - maybe in time for Christmas!
This might be the thing that gets me from "idly thinking about a DIY tablet every now and again" and actually doing it. Especially if someone designs a cheap, openable enclosure.
This looks cool! It has a 1-TB built-in hard disk and a wireless remote. It can store all your music and movies on the HD and play them back through your TV and/or sound system. Because it's based on the Pi, it's quiet (no fan) and low power - but still blazingly fast (full HD video at full HD frame rates no problem).
You can also load any Raspberry Pi operating system onto it - so if you just want a super-Pi that looks cool with a huge hard disk built into the box it will do that too.
I pledged. I'm pretty sure this kickstarter will quickly reach its target, so I expect to get my unit - maybe in time for Christmas!
Holy shit, this is exactly what I was looking for in this thread But I only just saw this post! Also, I've sort of learned to live with Chromecast for now.
But that is exactly what I was asking for when I said
Quote:
However I really do need to get an external HD soon. So the other possibility of buying the DMP in the OP and an external drive is more likely. I was just hoping to buy one small, simple device that could serve both functions.
And someone made it!
It's also a juiced up version of what ceptimus told me to make, but I was too lazy
I have a 3D printer But it probably costs more to ship even a 3D-printed case from the UK to the USA then it costs to buy one. And my 3D printer is heavy and fragile, so that would cost even more to ship.
But I see that in your technologically advanced country there's no need to have your own printer - you just walk in off the street, hand over a thumb drive or DVD and say, 'Print me out a couple of these cases please, while I go for a coffee.'
So, because I need something to work on while I'm applying for jobs and waiting for interviews ( I have one being scheduled.) I purchased a kit. My current plan for it is a "security camera" server.
My current plan is to hook up an old cheap VGA camera and have a live feed as well as a 1/2 second security picture log. This is because I'm too lazy to walk up the stairs every time the dogs freak out about someone at or near the front of the house. 80% of the time, it's just someone walking by or a particularly loud truck. For example, today is garbage day, so I'll get 3 separate barking sessions for garbage, recycling and yard waste.
If you can afford another $20 you'll be better getting a Raspberry Pi camera. It connects via its own ribbon cable to a dedicated camera connector on the Pi board and gives much better performance than a regular VGA camera without tying up a USB port. The PI camera is supported in the firmware and you can set it to take full HD video, stills, time lapse and/or lower resolution as required.
The PI camera is tiny, which may be a good or a bad thing depending on your application - but you can always fix it inside a box with the Pi and make the whole thing waterproof at the same time.
If you can afford another $20 you'll be better getting a Raspberry Pi camera. It connects via its own ribbon cable to a dedicated camera connector on the Pi board and gives much better performance than a regular VGA camera without tying up a USB port. The PI camera is supported in the firmware and you can set it to take full HD video, stills, time lapse and/or lower resolution as required.
The PI camera is tiny, which may be a good or a bad thing depending on your application - but you can always fix it inside a box with the Pi and make the whole thing waterproof at the same time.
So, I did, and had a lot easier time getting it to work, and it also fits into the case I bought fairly well - although it's not waterproof.
Now, my project is taking shape hardware-wise, and I've got the RPi running headless (I VNC into it to do things on it.) The question is how much I can do before I get a job or give up and use the programs that already do what I want.
I purchased one with the idea of using it is as gaming (RPG) table client, with either Roll20 (web based) or d20 Pro.
Out of the box the CuBox comes loaded with the Android OS (KitKat I believe) and it fired up nicely last night. Roll20 should work with little or no changes to the device. D20pro will require me to download and install one of the Linux images for the CuBox (I'll have to get a new sd card for that so I can just swap them).
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The best way to make America great is to lower the standards!
I should have sprung for one with Linux already on it. Roll20 doesn't support mobile browsers (which since this is running Android it appears as one) unless you subscribe to their service.
If I'm going to pay for a RPG app it will be d20Pro. So now I'm shopping for an 8gb microSD so I can put a linux dist on it and try out the device (I still want to keep the Android OS as I find it interesting).
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The best way to make America great is to lower the standards!
It has a quad core ARMv7 (previous model had a single core ARMv6). It also has twice as much RAM (1 GB) and is clocked faster (900MHz vs 500~700MHz for the previous ones). Other than that it's the same as the existing model so all the connectors are in the same place and pin compatible. Cost is about the same as before.
Real world speed improvements are said to be about six times faster than the previous unit - and now it's on ARMv7 it will be able to run more Linux distros and other operating systems. Apparently the Raspberry Pi team have been speaking to Microsoft and Windows 10 will be available on the Pi too.
I'm not rushing to buy one as I already have a few of the existing models, and for what I do with them I don't really need more processing power - but it's nice to see them moving with the times.
I have my raspberry pi in the front room, looking out the front window, near the front door.
It captures an image every 1/2 second. If there's detectable motion, it will save an image every second. If there's nothing going on, it will save an image every 15 minutes.
I'm very pleased.
The next steps are:
- adding configurable parameters and reconfiguration so I can run it as a daemon and tweak settings.
- Do better motion tracking. Right now I'm only looking at every 16th pixel on every 8th row. I stole that idea from "Motion" which has a similar concept as the "quick check" to see if it needs to do more details motion tracking.
- Also, with motion tracking, there are all sorts of potentially useful features, like adding masks, areas of interest, etc. That would be cool - Area of Interest is .
- Better font display. I handwrote a renderer using FreeType for speed and simplicity, but the font only looks good against dark backgrounds.
- EXIF data in the JPEG I'm saving.
- cover the red camera LED so it's not reflecting off the window.
- Actually do something with the images I'm saving. That might not be a Raspberry Pi project. I'm saving the files on a networked drive on an old netbook running Ubuntu. I might run a web server off of there.
Behold the fruits of my labours. It's dark outside.
Many cheap cameras (or those designed for it) can capture images in IR, while not very sensitive in and of itself it does mean you can get a bright LED IR spot that provides some illumination without your subjects knowing.
Many cheap cameras (or those designed for it) can capture images in IR, while not very sensitive in and of itself it does mean you can get a bright LED IR spot that provides some illumination without your subjects knowing.
There's a NoIR version of the pi camera, which you can use for IR photos. The regular camera has an IR filter in it.
I'm not very concerned about the darkness. I have a feature concept where I change the exposure mode at dusk/dawn, or when the image gets too dark or too bright, but it's a very low priority.
Try adding the line: disable_camera_led=1 to your /boot/config.txt file. In some versions of Raspbian that does work though there have been problems with it breaking after some updates.
You can also control the LED after someone else's firmware/program switches it by directly controlling GPIO 5 (this is the camera LED output).
A bit of tape or sugru over the LED might be simpler and still allow a tiny bit of light to escape through a side pinhole for testing purposes!
Oh, hey! Did I mention I plugged this thing into a monitor, turned it on, and installed raspbian?
Baby steps.
You are also gainfully employed.
It actually took me a lot longer than I wanted because I wasn't finding any decent documentation on the libraries I was using. MMAL isn't well documented, unless you know the underlying hardware already.
My motion detection sucks. I described it wrong before. I was dividing the image into a grid of 16 divisions wide, and 8 divisions high, and checking for changes at the intersection points of that grid.
At each pixel, I'm taking the distance between the two rgb values and checking to see if the distance > a fixed noise value. By distance, I mean sqrt(r^2 + g^2 + b^2), as if they were points in 3D space.
I walked up and down my driveway a few times, and... it barely recorded me, yet I'm getting a new picture every 1-2 minutes with no useful difference between them.
I just made some tweaks, and it's doing better, but I have some work to do.
I think you'd have better results if you work on bigger picture elements. I suggest taking rectangles of pixels and for each rectangle compute the average colour over the whole rectangle - sum the red, green, and blue components and then divide by the number of pixels to get the mean values.
The blocks could be just 4x4 pixels up to where the total picture is used - depending on how much processing power you want to devote to it.
Then I would scale the values so that changes in the overall illumination of the scene - such as the sun coming out from behind a cloud - won't make much difference, but changes in the colour of some pixels will.
It will still be confused by shadows though - especially moving shadows of, say, trees being blown by the wind.
I'm sure others will have written some code to do the same sort of security camera function - so the next thing I'd do is a bit of internet searching - not necessarily to use others' code - more to be inspired by their ideas...
I can reduce about 75% of false positives by adding an "area of interest" feature, which is part of the plan. I'm getting a lot of swaying branches.
The program I mentioned before - "Motion" has all sort of motion detection options and logic. I'm literally taking its worst idea as my motion detection logic. Part of the plan is to make it better. I'm sure I'll be reading up on how to improve it.
This looks cool! It has a 1-TB built-in hard disk and a wireless remote. It can store all your music and movies on the HD and play them back through your TV and/or sound system. Because it's based on the Pi, it's quiet (no fan) and low power - but still blazingly fast (full HD video at full HD frame rates no problem).
You can also load any Raspberry Pi operating system onto it - so if you just want a super-Pi that looks cool with a huge hard disk built into the box it will do that too.
I pledged. I'm pretty sure this kickstarter will quickly reach its target, so I expect to get my unit - maybe in time for Christmas!
Well, it actually arrived yesterday - July 6th!
Obviously I've been a bit disappointed by the roughly six months of delays, but this is the sort of thing you must expect when supporting a new project through Kickstarter or similar.
The longest delays for the slice were caused in finding suppliers that could machine and finish the metal cases to the high quality the developers demanded - they were let down by a series of different suppliers in China that produced good quality prototypes but then shoddy production units.
Now that my slice has arrived, my initial impressions are very good. It does everything as advertised and has a very high quality stylish look and feel. If you fancy one yourself they're now available - head on over to here: http://shop.fiveninjas.com/
Re: Raspberry Pi discussion
But I only just saw this post! Also, I've sort of learned to live with Chromecast for now.
But it probably costs more to ship even a 3D-printed case from the UK to the USA then it costs to buy one. And my 3D printer is heavy and fragile, so that would cost even more to ship. 
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